New Worlder—The Americas
Nicholas Gill grew up in Ohio eating processed food with no cultural connection to what was on the table. That absence became a compass. His first travels through Latin America revealed a biodiversity that fundamentally changed his understanding of what food could mean. Juliana Duque came from the opposite direction—a Colombian childhood rich with farmers’ market produce and fresh-cooked meals—but arrived at the same question as a philosophy student: why do people gather around food, and what does it reveal about us?
Together, they built New Worlder: first an award-winning online magazine, then a newsletter, now a podcast. Nearly two decades of tracing foodways from the Amazon to Patagonia. A PhD dissertation on Colombian chefs. An ongoing commitment to the stories that won’t let them go.
The Work
New Worlder runs on a simple editorial principle: interesting stories matter more than famous names. Their guests include Nephi Craig, an Apache chef in Arizona whose restaurant doubles as a cultural recovery and drug rehabilitation project; the team from Baldío in Mexico City, working with chinampas and zero-waste systems; Virgilio Martínez, Pía León, and Malena Martínez of Mater Iniciativa in Peru; and Sean Sherman, the Oglala Lakota chef behind Indígena by Owamni.
Celebrity chefs with PR teams, by contrast, often disappoint. “Chefs are usually the worst guests we’ve found,” Nicholas admits. “Most of them really don’t have much to say beyond the cooking.”
Nicholas photographs everything on his Amazon research trips, even though his forthcoming book will contain no photos, only stories. His hand-drawn ingredient glossaries on Substack let readers see 20 or 30 regional ingredients side by side, building a picture of the hemisphere’s staggering culinary diversity.
Why It Matters
New Worlder’s journalism models what responsible storytelling about the Americas can look like: following genuine curiosity, naming the people behind the food, and stepping back so communities can speak for themselves. It’s not about geographic correction or sustainability lectures. It’s about sustained attention, following threads over years and decades rather than chasing viral moments.
“It’s not just what is this and what does it taste like,” Nicholas says. “It’s why is it there, and why does it taste like that? And who are the people that grew it?”
The economics of independent food media remain hard. But as the corporate media landscape has collapsed, New Worlder has found that leaving it created new possibilities—the freedom to say no to extraction, build long-term relationships, and do the slow work that depth requires.
“Part of Nick’s success, even if it’s hard, is he’s been writing for nearly 25 years, consistently,” Juliana notes. “That’s hard work. Most people don’t have that discipline.”
Support This Work
New Worlder publishes food stories, essays, and podcast conversations from across the Americas. → Read and listen at newworlder.com
Nephi Craig’s forthcoming book, Our Knives Will Save Us: Dispatches from a White Mountain Apache Chef, carries the same philosophy of food as cultural recovery onto the page. → Pre-order from Penguin Random House
Read the full conversation → When Curiosity Becomes Compass — A deeper exploration of responsible storytelling, indigenous food sovereignty, and what it means to cover the Americas with genuine attention.
